Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Visual Arts - Visiting Artists

During the residencies, visiting artists, art critics, curators, and art historians from throughout the art world join the community and become active participants in the dialogues about art and art-making.

Art Talks Lecture Series | January 12-15, 2015

Complementing the expertise of the MFA in Visual Arts faculty, Visiting Artists, Writers, Art Historians/Critics and Curators give lectures and presentations of their work and ideas during a public lecture series sponsored by the program during each residency; they also participate in critiques of student work.

The Art Talks Lecture Series is sponsored by The Lesley University College of Art and Design MFA in Visual Arts Program and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

NANCY SHAVER | Monday, January 12

"Bits and pieces, and a here and there. I find myself always gravitating toward detail, finding a snippet of living which can reveal larger meaning. These snippets do not require attention, but are available for the observer. They form my work, are both subject and source."

Nancy Shaver is an artist who lives and works in Jefferson and Hudson, New York. For the last 28 years, she has shown her work in New York City. She has been at Feature Inc. for the past 14 years. Along with Allyson Strafella and Max Goldfarb she runs Incident Report, whose mission is to display other artists' work to the public of Hudson. Her grants and awards include: Pollack-Krasner, An Anonymous Was A Woman, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Tiffany Foundation Award.

THIERRY DE DUVE | Tuesday, January 13

Thierry de Duve will discuss the Invention of Non-Art

Thierry de Duve is a historian and philosopher of art, and Professor emeritus from the University of Lille 3, and was Kirk Varnedoe Visiting Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, for the fall semester of 2013. His English publications include Pictorial Nominalism (1991), Kant after Duchamp (1996), Clement Greenberg Between the Lines (1996, 2010), Look--100 Years of Contemporary Art (2001), and Sewn In the Sweatshops of Marx: Beuys, Warhol, Klein, Duchamp (2012). He recently finished a book of essays on aesthetics, forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.

OLIVER WASOW | Wednesday, January 14

Photographer Oliver Wasow was born in Madison Wisconsin in 1960. His work is currently represented by Theodore:Arts in New York City. One person exhibitions include Janet Borden Gallery, NYC; Tom Solomon Gallery, LA; The South Eastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston - Salem, North Carolina, and Galerie De Poche, Paris. His work has also been included in numerous national and international group shows, including such benchmark exhibitions as Image World at the Whitney Museum, NYC, and The Photography of Invention at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, His photographs are in a number of private collections as well as prominent public collections, including the Whitney and MoMA, NYC. Reviews of his work have been featured in most major art publications, including, among others, Art Forum, ArtNews and The New York Times. He has been the recipient of various grants and awards including a Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant in 1999 and, in 2000, his second New York State Council on the Arts Grant.

B. WURTZ | Thursday, January 15

B.Wurtz creates sculptures using everyday materials to explore and deflate issues of the heroic, the monumental, and the sublime. Created with great attention to the palette of his materials, he brings a pop-painterly sensibility, alongside a sense of the absurd, to the composition of his objects as he simultaneously seeks to dismantle the conventions of sculpture.